Adventure Song: Mystic Channels

So, the thing that kicked off my current round of game dev was the post I made earlier in the summer about a D&D-ish spell system that uses "spells on" as the metric for what wizards can do as opposed to "spells cast per day".

The system I've come up is one where essentially for every circle of spells (level of spells, in D&D's parlance... I dislike using "level" to refer to something that doesn't 1-for-1 correspond to character levels) your character could cast by experience level, you have one mystic channel. A spell fills a number of channels equal to its circle. So if fireball is a third circle spell, you need three open channels to cast it. Since the spell is instant, it passes through those channels without occupying them, but it needs them to be cleared. If you were maintaining a third circle invisibility spell, it would take up three channels. If you don't have six channels or more, you couldn't cast fireball while invisible.

There is a separate resource management aspect used for empowering spells (the normal fireball spell is just a more powerful attack spell; you have to spend a daily resource to make it explosive like the classic D&D one), but overall it's more a question of how much wizards can do at once rather than one of resource management.

Originally I had things broken down so that each caster type had their own channels so if you have multiple caster levels (multiclass cleric/druid, for instance) you'd have two sets of channels, or if your caster level wasn't the same as your experience level (multiclass cleric/fighter, or whatever), you'd have fewer channels.

But that makes the bookkeeping more complicated. This is the kind of idea that works well when it's simple though it could get complicated fast. A level character only has one channel so only has one thing to worry about. The most channels a character can easily get is 10 and there's close to a hard maximum of 16, and both of those numbers assume you've been playing all the way up to the god levels, learning how to juggle them and keep track of spells as you go.

Once I made the decision that your overall character level determines how many mystic channels you have, rather than having wizard channels and druid channels and so on, the next realization was: this means everyone has them. Even characters who don't use spells and aren't likely to learn any.

Well, I'd wanted to have a system that would limit your ability to use magic items safely/to full effect by level. Having them occupy channels would answer that. And it would also explain why every wizard doesn't just have a set of magic armor robes. It's much easier to have a defensive spell that can be dropped for a few seconds if you suddenly need those channels open then it is to quickly change robes every time you underestimated your immediate power needs.

So at the high levels, the person with the most high power magical weapons and armor would be the person who uses the least magic for anything else. Just sort of as a natural consequence. A level 30 fighter would have 10 channels that just sat there empty, but give them a fourth circle suit of armor, a third circle sword, and a third circle shield... meanwhile the rogue's got slightly less magical gear because they have a few spells they like to be able to whip out, and the wizard mostly relies on the magic items that produce spell-like effects, which don't occupy channels until they're activated.

I've got a few other things in mind for mystic channels.

A monk's disciplines (the structure for basically all their special abilities) will use channels, so at level 1 your monk can be using iron shirt or stone fist but not both at the same time, whereas at level 10 they could be long jumping, wall-climbing, holding poison at bay from their heart, trapping a possessing demon in their mind, and using stone fist and iron shirt... though since some disciplines can be increased in power by throwing them through more channels, their combat-fu would be less powerful the more other things they're doing.

A barbarian's base level rage probably won't occupy any channels, but the kind of elemental and/or totemic effects that 4E added would.

Basically, characters of a given level have a (mostly) set capacity for supernatural activity. At level one it's "one thing at a time".

Game Design: Random comparison between 4E and 5E

I've heard people saying that 5E completely scrapped everything that 4E did, and when I read the basic guide and then the PHB, I really couldn't believe that this was the general impression. Yeah, the presentation is more old school, but they've incorporated so much of 4E's overall sensibilities and ideas.

And the other day, I think I hit upon the word that sums up the real big difference between 4E and 5E, and I think it's the word that is the substance at the heart of a lot of the grumbling about 4E being "video gamey" or "non-immersive".

The word is interface.

4E, in its quest to standardize information and make sure you always had your options at your fingerprints, created a much more obvious, visible, and tangible interface between the players and their characters, between the players and the world.

When I talk about this, I'm not talking about the computerization of the game. Or even the physical props like cards and tokens that they were pushing. I'm talking about the system itself, and the assumptions it made about how the players would interact with the game.

And it was meant to simplify things, but it was often confusing. Because players didn't just need to understand the game, they needed to understand the interface. They need to internalize what the colors on the colorful cards/stat blocks mean, what the things encoded in the keywords mean, et cetera.

And the interface has always been there... dice and character sheets and sometimes maps and sometimes maps and minis, use of game-specific or hobby-specific standardized notations, et cetera.

At times it's been klunkier and more cumbersome than others (looking at you, 2nd Edition AD&D), but it's always had a relatively low profile. Then 4E came along and made the interface a huge part of the game.

And it worked for me. It worked for a lot of people. I had the mental connection that the interface was not the game, and the interface didn't get in the way of the game for me. But in retrospect and when I compare it to 5E, I can see how the interface had the ability to distract from the game, to slow the game, to slow the learning process for people who weren't getting the interface.

While there's a lot to be said about the way 5E is written towards newbies versus the way that 4E was presented (essentially, like a puzzle with no edge pieces... if you don't already know what the picture is supposed to be, how would you even know where to start?), I think that shifting the focus back away from the interface made a big difference in making this newbie-friendliness possible.

It's something to keep in mind with my own game design experiments. I spent a lot of time emulating the interface of 4E because I saw it as an integral part of the ideas it supported. I was already re-examining that assumption before I gave 5E a proper hearing, but now I think it can be completely laid to rest.